stucco also stuc. Slow-setting plaster known from Antiquity, and made of various ingredients. There are basically two types of stucco: one made from limes and the other from plaster, the former often classed under cements. As an external rendering, common stucco is a plastered finish of lime, sand, brick-dust, stone-dust, or powdered burnt clay nodules, mixed with water, used as a finish instead of stone, often lined to resemble ashlar-work, and moulded to form architectural features such as string-courses, cornices, etc. Internal stucco, widely used in C18, and elaborately modelled, was made of very fine sand, pulverized white Carrara marble, gypsum (hydrated calcium sulphate), alabaster-dust, and water, often with other additions, such as colouring, provided by mixing in metallic oxides etc. It was sometimes mixed with size or gum dissolved in lukewarm water, often with the colour also dissolved in the size water. When the stucco was perfectly dry it was rubbed and polished.

Historically, stucco was widely used by the Romans and in Islamic architecture, but it reached new heights during the Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo periods, especially in Southern Germany, where the great masters included members of the Wessobrunn School (notably J. G. Üblhör (1703–63) and J. M. Feichtmayr (1696–1772) ), and Zimmermann.

Bibliography

G Beard (1983);
Blunt (1978);
Garstang (1984);
Gwilt (1903);
Jahn (1988);
Nicholson (1835);
W. Papworth (1887);
Schnell & and Schedler (1988);
Sturgis et al. (1901–2);
Jane Turner (1996);
Vance (1983)

stuc·co / ˈstəkō/ • n. fine plaster used for coating wall surfaces or molding into architectural decorations.• v. (-coes, -coed) [tr.] [usu. as adj.] (stuccoed) coat or decorate with such plaster: a stuccoed house.

stucco plaster for covering walls, etc. XVI — It. — Gmc. word repr. by OHG. stukki fragment, piece, (also) crust.